Should the USA Be Run Like a Business?

For years, many Americans have believed that the nation should be run more like a business. This was the premise behind billionaire CEO Ross Perot’s independent campaign in 1992. And it has been the premise behind nearly every successful business leader’s political campaign since that moment – including Donald Trump’s.

This message apparently resonates with voters, because between 1980 and 2014, the percentage of federal officeholders who were former business leaders increased from 14 to 21 percent. And now, at the highest echelons of government, wealthy business leaders have unprecedented control. Donald Trump invited 13 billionaires to serve in his Cabinet, and that doesn’t even include the richest and most powerful advisor to the administration – Elon Musk. Nor does it include the head billionaire himself: Donald Trump.

If the goal of this unprecedented experiment in giving the reins of power to business leaders without previous political experience was to get the United States to function more like a business, the experiment seems to be worrying, because Trump and Musk are running the country like they ran their businesses.

As businessmen, both Trump and Musk experienced wild swings in their fortunes. They ran companies into the ground, only to start over again on new ventures. They took spectacular risks – most of which ultimately panned out, but some of which failed spectacularly.

Trump’s businesses filed for bankruptcy six times between 1990 and 2009. Musk avoided actually declaring bankruptcy, but says that at one point earlier in his career he was only one month away from doing so. But if Musk himself didn’t lose his job, plenty of other people did under some of his hostile business takeovers. When Musk took over Twitter, he laid off more than 6,000 workers – about 80 percent of the company’s workforce.

The style of governance that we’ve seen during the past few weeks closely accords with the patterns that both Trump and Musk set in their businesses: a pattern of hostile takeovers, daring risks, and dizzying turns of fortune. The revived American imperialism that we’re seeing, with Trump regularly dropping suggestions that he wants the United States to take over both Canada and Greenland (as well as the Panama Canal), reflects the business practices of a man who made his fortune taking over real estate even when the people in the area opposed it, as the residents of Balmedie, Scotland, did when he insisted on building a golf course there against their wishes and then tried to evict them from their homes.

And if a policy of territorial imperialism is very much on-brand for Trump, so is his willingness to take the US economy on a wild ride by launching trade wars that even he now admits could plunge the United States into a recession.

Similarly, Musk’s complete disregard for the corporate culture of the businesses he has taken over – such as Twitter, for instance – and his willingness to ruthlessly cut staff have translated well into his actions as head of DOGE.

In short, we’re getting the corporate leadership that Americans voted for: The people in the executive branch are running the country just like they ran their businesses.

But this doesn’t have to be the model of business leadership that we apply to the federal government.

Fifty years ago, the Republican multimillionaires in the Senate and in state governor’s mansions had a very different approach to governance, because they had practiced a very different model of corporate leadership when they were in business.

Charles Percy, who served as president of Bell and Howell for fifteen years before being elected a Republican senator from Illinois, was a strong supporter of government-funded low-income housing and civil rights legislation. In the interest of protecting the environment and promoting safety, he sponsored legislation to set the national speed limit at only 55 mph.

George Romney, the president of American Motors Corporation (and father of Mitt Romney), was likewise a liberal Republican who was known as a supporter of civil rights.

The Republican politicians who were second-generation millionaire heirs to family business fortunes likewise were generally supportive of a strong social safety net. Lowell Weicker (the Connecticut governor and later senator who was the son of a pharmaceutical company executive), John Heinz (the Pennsylvania senator whose family wealth had come from the Heinz ketchup fortune), and William Scranton (whose family had founded the coal company that had essentially made Scranton, Pennsylvania) were all liberal members of their party who believed in protecting business interests, but who also believed that this economic agenda had to be coupled with a strong social safety net and concern for the rights of racial minorities and the less fortunate.

The difference in outlook between the multimillionaire Republicans of the 1970s and the billionaire business veterans of today’s GOP can be explained, I think, by examining the differences in their business practices.

In the mid-twentieth century, Fortune 500 companies made their fortunes by investing heavily in their communities. They were stable enterprises – and their leaders promoted stability by investing heavily in their employees and in their local cities. Corporate leadership rarely experienced much turnover; the typical CEO expecting to stay at a company for many years and establish long-term residency in the city where the company was headquartered.

When the original Fortune 500 list was published in 1955, the number one company on that list was General Motors, which made headlines as the nation’s first company to earn more than $1 billion in a single year. The CEO of GM was Harlow Curtice, whose photo was featured on Time magazine because of his business success. But unlike most modern CEOs, Curtice’s career was remarkably stable. By 1955, he had been working for GM for 41 years. He had started as a supervisor immediately after graduating from college in 1914, and he had then worked his way up through the vice presidency until finally being named CEO. As a man who worked at the same company for his entire career and who lived in Flint, Curtice knew the corporate culture of GM. The idea of a Trump-style CEO who bankrupts the company or a Musk-style CEO who would cut 80 percent of the workforce in a single year would have been unthinkable in the era of Curtice. Curtice didn’t start GM, and he knew that he wouldn’t end it. Instead, he behaved as a caretaker, guiding GM onto continued growth in a way that would lead to long-term stability for the company’s employees at every level.

And if that was true of GM, it was also true of other companies on the Fortune 500 list from 1955. Behind each company story is likely a story not only of stable growth but also of long-term investment in workers and in a community.

For example, the company that ranked number 19 on the 1955 Fortune 500 list was Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, whose CEO, Paul Litchfield, had been the company’s president for 25 years at that point. Litchfield had worked for Goodyear for his entire adult life. In 1899, as a newly minted, MIT-graduated engineer, he had acquired a patent for pneumatic tires, which then became the company’s staple product. Litchfield continued to rise through the ranks of management until becoming CEO in 1930, a position that he then held for decades.

Because Litchfield spent most of his adult life at this one company in Akron, Ohio, he invested heavily in the community. Litchfield Middle School in Akron, Lake Litchfield in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, and Kent State University’s Litchfield scholarship are testimonies to Litchfield’s impact on the community, which included contributions to the University of Akron and to Akron’s public schools. Goodyear created housing for workers, organized a city bus system to bring workers to their jobs, and created a training program to help workers advance in the company.

And this is just one small case study among many – and one that I happen to know better than most because my grandfather worked for Goodyear for about 25 years. He joined the company as a young engineer in the late 1940s, when Litchfield was the company’s president, and he continued working there until the early 1970s, when a sudden economic downturn in the Ohio Rust Belt forced him to look for another job. But until that time, Goodyear, like most major manufacturing companies of the time, was remarkably stable in its growth and in its investment in workers and the community. Many of Goodyear’s other workers, at both the assembly line and the management levels, were like my grandfather – people who invested their careers in the company and expected the company to reciprocate by keeping them employed for the long term.

During this era, Akron-Canton’s heavily industrialized congressional district was represented for several decades by the conservative Republican Frank Bow, an advocate of tax reform and cuts in government spending in order to balance the budget – which was the generally accepted definition of “conservative” at the time. Bow was not a business executive, but he had been a journalist before entering politics, and his economic views were designed to foster the sort of economic stability that most of the nation’s Republican-leaning business executives favored. But Bow also believed in a strong social safety net. In 1962, he coauthored legislation to provide federally funded medical coverage for all Americans over age 65 – the program that would become Medicare. And he voted for every civil rights bill that crossed his desk.

Republican fiscal prudence, pro-business policies, and commitment to a humane social safety net could comfortably coexist in an era when most leading business executives favored economic and community stability and when corporate CEOs were committed to the well-being of their local cities.

But today that era seems to have vanished. The business leaders elected to Congress today rarely have experienced the long-term commitment to a single company that characterized the CEOs of the 1950s-1970s. Instead, they are likely to have earned their wealth through trading companies and managing investments, leaving behind plenty of layoffs (and no philanthropic investments in a community) in their wake.

If running the United States like a business meant investing in the long-term wellbeing of its people and creating economic stability – as the CEOs of the 1950s-1970s seemed to think – I might be in favor of it. But if it means introducing drastic cuts in the federal workforce for no apparent reason or taking the country on a wild economic ride that will likely put millions of people out of work, only because of a harebrained scheme to launch a hostile takeover of another country, I’ll take a pass. That’s not the kind of business leadership that America needs. And it’s not the kind of business leadership that we have to have. There is a better business model, if only Americans would be willing to look back at the recent past to recover it.